Chris Barrow’s Blog

Bad Business

Chris | December 29, 2008

Since you're new to the CoachBarrow.com site, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Commiserations to Aer Lingus for having systems that get in the way of good business.

Its 27th December and I am driving from Falmouth to Manchester with Annie.

I’m about to visit with my kids and Annie is due to board a flight to Dublin and spend a few days with her best friend, who has just given birth to a girl.

Annie and Clare haven’t seen each other for a year and so it will be an exciting trip.

We have a 350-mile drive to the airport – and it all goes swimmingly until 35 miles away, when the M6 just clogs up with post-Christmas traffic and we are stationary and watching the clock ago around faster then my wheel rims.

After some cross-country rallying, I arrive at the Ryan Air check-in desk just 15 minutes late but I know the rules – there is NO CHANCE that we will get her on the flight.

Choices:

pay a Â£75 re-booking fee to get her on the 9.30pm flight that evening or
find another carrier to Dublin earlier that day.

The people at the Servisair desk are very helpful and tell us that the only other flight to Dublin is with Aer Lingus at 7.25pm.

That’s 2 hours earlier and might save Clare a later drive to the airport.

Its Christmas and there is no ticketing office open – so I call Aer Lingus telephone bookings and speak to a nice chap in a call-centre who tells me that I can buy a one-way ticket on the 7.25pm flight – for only Â£247 including taxes.

I explain that I can get a flight 2 hours later for Â£75 – does he want the business?

No he does not want the business – what he wants is to press the correct buttons on his computer.

What would I have paid? Probably up to Â£100 – but he is not able to or interested in negotiating.

Rules are rules – and rules are what break businesses in a slump.

The cost of booking Annie on the earlier flight would have been negligible – and Aer Lingus would have been Â£100 better off – but I bet they don’t give a damn.

Here’s a question – do your staff have the option of making sensible decisions when they fly in the face of rules?

Needless to say – it was the 9.30pm flight that took Annie to her destination – and I hear that all is well in Dublin and the baby is a peach.

Socially Speaking

Categories: Customer service
: Comments rss
: Trackback

4 responses

Excellent post Chris! It strikes me that as highly technical

Mark Oborn | December 29, 2008

Excellent post Chris! It strikes me that as highly technical people dentists/technicians/hygienists are bound by processes and rules, we all know that if we cut corners at some point in the process that it will come back to bite us. We write rules and protocols for every procedure we do, and spend hours…no YEARS refining them so that our lives are made simple and predictable when we practice our science of dentistry.

The problem is that we then translate this to our business. If we were a manufacturing industry with a highly standardised product this approach may work…but we are not, we are a service, and so many technical dental business owners treat their business as though we are making cardboard boxes, without empowering their workforce to make the RIGHT decision at a key point in the customer experience.

I hope this post is read and taken note of by many….thank Chris.

Regards,

Mark

Here's a thought... what would be your position if a

Paul Cole | December 30, 2008

Here’s a thought… what would be your position if a patient arrived at the desk 10 minutes prior to their appointment for a filling and said that they did not want to pay £120, they would only pay £80 as they could have it done elsewhere at that price. Do you turn away the patient and have £0 and an empty chair, or do you accept the £80… ‘Do you want the business?’

The likes of South West Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Ikea and

Sital | December 31, 2008

The likes of South West Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Ikea and Asda have taken market share from their larger competitors in recent years because they:

1) Run their businesses based on ‘Principles’ instead of just ‘Rules’

Rules = are black and white. Little room for grey areas (or common sense)
Principles = broad values and attitudes that define the business (attitude to customers, how you behave internally, general standards etc)

2) Hire people who share their values, can think for themselves, have common sense and can make decisions (i.e. don’t just hire people who follow rules and can’t think for themselves)

3) Indocrinate their people with the principles and values of their business (i.e. in the same way parents indocrinate their kids with their own value system)

4) Empower, train and trust their customer facing teams to make decisions that are right for each situation based on the company values and principles
(i.e you can’t prepare kids with rules for every situation – but give them the right values and in the long run they’ll make the right decision most of time)

5) Let people screw up, get things wrong, learn from mistakes and course correct

6) Have modern leaders in the field who coach and facilitate the above

Ryan Air (and many dental practices) may talk a good game on customer service and may have many of the above points in place. But it’s usually points 5 and 6 that they fall down on and so revert to black and white rules they can ‘control’ even if it means losing business.